City building

I've recently really wanted to design medieval or early renaissance towns and cities. I have few good ideas how to start and progress them. But not understanding things like how huge farmlands and such are needed to support them and how many people (families really, because roughly house per family) live in the city make it difficult.

I had a lot of thought put into this a year or two ago, when I was thinking why the town was there in the first place, what it started out as, what would've appeared first to grow it, and iterate that until there's an actual town. That is at its core, what it started out as, and what was established that grew it. Iterating that number of times to grow the town in roughly organic manner.

For advanced generation I should consider more things like what affects the population, like immigration and emigration, disease outbreaks, murder sprees and mass accidents, external threats, and so forth. The town usually would try to prevent the bad kind of from happening again, so how the town grows changes with this. The good kind of changes can also inspire change.

Even more advanced tracking notable individuals in the history of the town who affect the town, pioneers and entrepreneurs and other such hugely impactful people.

In the end I'd like to skip that iterative process and have just a guideline for how to make something that looks well developed but isn't.

I'm going to spend some time looking for resources for this, but for now this is the basic idea for creating towns. This kind of process is more of interest when the history of the town is important, not for throwaway towns that are of barely any interest. Not to mention none of this considers the stage at which urban planning becomes a thing.

Edit (2016-08-20), some resources:
* http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm
* http://www.medieval-spell.com/Medieval-Towns/
* http://www.lostkingdom.net/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning

Beginning

So I decided to start writing again. Not about anything specific, just to have my thoughts and ideas written down to something that someone could someday stumble upon and read and maybe have few fun ideas from. Likelihood very low, but that's what I wanted, so here it is. I'm writing this for myself first and foremost, like a diary but not that personal, other people being interested is just a bonus.

I used to have Livejournal account ages ago where I wrote a lot of random stuff that came to mind, talked about depression, art I was doing, and anything else. I was hoping for this to have more direction than that. Specifically I want to talk about creating stuff, it doesn't matter what I want to create, I want to write about it. My thoughts, my ideas, my research and such. It's not going to be very well thought out or thoroughly research, no, that's not what I do. It's going to be usually short, with no proof given on anything unless the proof matters to me, possibly bunch of links to other people's stuff that shows things, and so forth.